Char Miller | Professor

Professor Char Miller specializes in American environmental, cultural, and urban history. He served as chair of the History Department from 1998 to 2004, and since 2001 has been Director of Urban Studies. He was named a Piper Professor for teaching excellence in 2002, a state-wide prize awarded by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation for excellence in teaching and service to higher education; in 1997, he was awarded the Dr. and Mrs. Z. T. Scott Faculty Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching at Trinity University. He has the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Johns Hopkins University.

A Senior Fellow of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, Miller is a Contributing Writer of the Texas Observer, Associate Editor of Environmental History and for the Journal of Forestry, is on the Editorial Board of the Pacific Historical Review, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Forest History Society. A member of the Trustee Advisory Board for the Witte Museum in San Antonio, he has served on the City of San Antonio's Open Space Advisory Board and its Tree Preservation Ordinance Panel.

With Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson, Miller is directing the Bexar County History Project, for which students in history, urban studies, and other disciplines are researching the county's history in local archives, and then writing biographical essays about its political leadership. Following a professional review process, their essays are then published online in the The Journal of the Life and Culture of San Antonio.

While on leave in 2004-05, Miller was the P. J. Roosevelt Lecturer for the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the Centennial Lecturer for the U.S. Forest Service. The latter organization sponsored a tour of the United States that allowed Miller to speak on the history and politics of federal land management since the late nineteenth century. The tour began in Montana, wended its way through Canada, Alaska, California and Oregon, and then east to New Hampshire, North Carolina and Florida. Stops in Washington, D.C., Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, and in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, among many other places, rounded out the more than 100,000-mile jaunt during which Miller delivered more than 70 lectures.

Publications

Books
• Surging Waters: The 1921 Flood and the Reconstruction of San Antonio, (Austin: University of Texas Press, under contract)
• Ground Work: Conservation in American Environmental Culture, (Durham: Forest History Society, 2007)
• Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land & Life in South Texas, (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2004)
• Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, (Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2001; paperback, 2004)
• The Greatest Good: 100 Years of Forestry in America, (Washington, D.C.: The Society of American Foresters, 1999; second edition, 2004)
• Gifford Pinchot: The Evolution of An American Conservationist, The Pinchot Lecture Series, (Milford, PA: Grey Towers Press, 1993)
• Fathers and Sons: The Bingham Family and the American Mission, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). In the series, American Civilization, edited by Allen F. Davis
  
  View Dr. Miller's vita

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